Saving a city icon - the 'king of Indian roads'

The yellow cabs are among the city's most recognisable icons, but they are falling in numbers.

- Debarshi Dasgupta

KOLKATA - Every city has its icons. The eastern Indian metropolis of Kolkata, one of the most important cities in the erstwhile British Empire, has a cornucopia of them.

There's the Victoria Memorial, a sprawling 20th-century marble edifice with an Angel of Victory mounted atop its dome. There's also the Indian Coffee House, a pre-independence era cafe immortalised in a 1980s Bengali hit song and one that remains popular despite its watery cold coffee and greasy cutlets.

Among the many other icons that define this charming city is its yellow Hindustan Ambassador taxi - known for its high curvy roofline, a large boot and adequate room for six passengers or even more on its two rows of bench seats.

It's hands down one of Kolkata's most loved and recognisable icons. Introduced in the 1960s, these Ambassador cabs seem to be thriving everywhere - cinema screens, novels, posters, coffee mugs, T-shirts, saris and more.

But on the city's roads, where they are originally meant to be, it is another story. Here, they are a dying breed.

In 2008, in an attempt to cut down Kolkata's notorious vehicular pollution, the Calcutta High Court ordered that no commercial vehicles older than 15 years could ply the city.

It was a death knell for the city's fleet of diesel-run yellow cabs, one that rang even louder in 2014 when Hindustan Motors stopped producing Ambassador cars.

Just an estimated 4,000 yellow taxis currently operate legally in Kolkata, and by the end of 2025, 2,000 of them are expected to be decommissioned.

More such unceremonious send-offs are expected in the following years, with the last few slated to go off the roads by 2029, 15 years after the last Ambassador cars rolled out of the Hindustan Motors factory in Kolkata.